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Amazon cuddles up to Chinese public sector with AWS rollout

Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region first to get Bezos' cloudy offering

Amazon has sent its cloud service floating high over China for the first time after announcing a limited rollout of its AWS cloud platform, making the Middle Kingdom the 10th country to be offered the service..

A "select group of China-based and multinational companies" will be offered the chance to try out the cloud at the beginning of 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services said: "China represents an important long-term market segment for AWS. We are looking forward to working with Chinese customers, partners, and government institutions to help small and large organizations use cloud computing to innovate and deploy faster, save money, expand their geographic reach, and do so without sacrificing security, availability, data durability, and reliability."

Amazon said their cloud would stop the "undifferentiated heavy lifting of IT for Chinese business".

It continued: "Prior to AWS, businesses would take on the massive capital investment of building their own IT infrastructure or contracting with a vendor for datacentre capacity that they might or might not use. This choice meant either paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that their forecasted capacity was insufficient to keep pace with their growth."

AWS China has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Beijing municipal government and the Government of Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region, which reflects all parties' "intent to construct and develop high-performing, reliable, and economical AWS cloud computing services" across China.

The Government of Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region will use Amazon's cloud to run its public service applications.

Yuan Jiajun, executive vice chairman of the Government of Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region said, "This will help fully utilize datacentre and infrastructure resources in Beijing and Ningxia, and provide highly reliable and secure cloud services to millions of Chinese customers. The local presence of AWS will help to accelerate the pace-of-innovation of Chinese businesses and further bolster China's economy."

Non-profit anti-censorship body GreatFire.org recently used Amazon Web Services to mirror the Reuters news site, allowing dissidents within the People's Republic to access uncensored news. ®

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